“Ginge!” Jamie stole a bite of waffle from my plate. I gave him an elbow in the gut—not hard, but he got his own rather than stealing more of mine. Unfortunately, I could elbow him all day and most of tomorrow and he’d never stop calling me “Ginger.”
If he’d been an aficionado of Gilligan’s Island, the nickname would have been more appealing. Ginger Grant was a very hot redhead. Except Gilligan’s Island had been popular during our grandparents’ day and I doubted that Jamie had ever bothered watching an episode.
Jamie called me “Ginger” because of South Park, which didn’t make the comment half as nice. Little brothers, even when they were no longer little, were mostly annoying.
Joe, who always let Jamie do the talking, just winked and followed him to the food. At least he didn’t touch any of mine.
Like all the Carstairs, except me, my brothers had light brown hair. When they were three, they’d been blond, just like Mellie. Mellie still was, thanks to a monthly appointment for highlights and root control. All of them also had pretty blue eyes, which made my mud-green shade even more noticeably different.
My flame-red hair was as much a mystery to my parents as to me. I’d asked every relative we had if any Carstairs in memory had ever possessed red hair. None had.
Kids noticed how different I was from every other Carstairs on the planet, which led to a lifetime of comments about the “stork getting it wrong,” and other oh-so-amusing jibes.
I loved my parents, my siblings, loved this town, or I wouldn’t have come back after college, but there was always a part of me that felt as if I’d been plunked into Three Harbors by strange forces and not born here like everyone else.
“Sweetheart.” My dad kissed the top of my head, paused, sniffed. “You’ve been playing with cows again.”
You’d think he wouldn’t be able to smell cows on me since he had enough cow smell on himself. You’d think wrong.
“Watley’s.” My mom brought my dad both his coffee and his plate. “Twin heifers.”
I used to find it beyond frustrating that she waited on him like that. Then she caught the flu once—and only once, which is another subject entirely. She’d had four kids. Four! And we’d brought home all sorts of things—germs, foster sons, hedgehogs.
While Mom had been down with the flu, Dad had trashed the kitchen just trying to make cereal, and all became clear to me. She didn’t wait on him because she was the woman and he was the man; she waited on him because he was a slob and she didn’t want him anywhere near her kitchen.
“Trouble?” My dad stirred cream and sugar into his coffee.
“I wouldn’t have been there if there weren’t trouble.”
Most of the time cows had calves all by themselves, sometimes the farmer didn’t even know about it until the cow walked back in with an extra.
“Good point.” He toasted me with his cup, drank.
My father’s face was well lived in—weather crinkles around the eyes, smile lines framed his mouth. His hair had highlights without help from anything but the sun, though his roots were gray. As he said when Mom teased him, at least he still had hair. A lot of his pals didn’t.
“Where’s your car?”
“Owen brought her.”
Silence fell. Everyone but my mother, who was pouring bacon grease into a tin can, stared at me.
“Owen’s back?” Jamie asked.
“It would be a little hard for him to give me a ride if he wasn’t.”
“Ha-ha.” Jamie took the chair across from mine. His plate was so full he really should have used two. “Why’s he here? Where’d you see him? Is it true he’s in explosives detection? What—”
I held up my hand. “I’ll tell you all I know if you just zip it.”
Jamie didn’t have to be told twice. If his mouth was asking questions he couldn’t eat. Not at my mom’s table. So he zipped it, then tucked into the plate as I recited all I knew. Almost.
I wasn’t going to discuss the new breadth to Owen’s shoulders, the fresh calluses on his hands. I especially didn’t plan to relate the same, great taste of his mouth.
My father began to make a waffle sandwich, something he did only when he had someplace else to be.
“Where are you going?”
He glanced up in the middle of squirting syrup on top of the butter he’d spread on two waffles like bread. “I need to check the fence on